Tricky perfcounters stoped working in 1.8

[gospodin.horoshiy]

Hello, I used to monitor network in windows using perfcounters, by adding these parameters into .conf file of the agent automaticaly during installation.

Like so:

PerfCounter=uNetwork.in0,"\Сетевой интерфейс(Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet 10_100_1000Base-T Controller - Packet Scheduler Miniport)\Получено байт/сек",60
PerfCounter=uNetwork.out0,"\Сетевой интерфейс(Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet 10_100_1000Base-T Controller - Packet Scheduler Miniport)\Отправлено байт/сек",60
PerfCounter=uNetwork.all0,"\Сетевой интерфейс(Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet 10_100_1000Base-T Controller - Packet Scheduler Miniport)\Всего байт/сек",60


Unfortunately, they are not supported somehow after 1.6->1.8 upgrade.

Here is what agent's log saying:

7644:20091208:203003.015 Unable to add performance counter '\Сетевой интерфейс(Atheros L1 Gigabit Ethernet 10_100_1000Base-T Controller - Packet Scheduler Miniport)\Всего байт/сек' to query: The specified object is not found on the system.

I'm afraid that this have something to do with all these \ _ = ( ) chars or perhaps rus literals. Still, this used to work in 1.6.

Tested on two PC's

[rincewind]

Why do you do it in the zabbix_agentd.conf file? Since 1.8 version, perfcounters with non-latin characters works fine as data items and there is no need to do that in conf file. As I think, problem in that zabbix is fully UTF-8 support system, and, this way, zabbix_agentd.conf file with russian chars MUST be saved as Unicode file, not just as plain ASCII.

[gospodin.horoshiy]

I have to add them in conf since names of ethernet cards are always different, so that would be imposible to put perfcounter into Template. So I add them to conf file by script during the agent's installation.


About the unicode conf file, I think i got the idea, I'll try that thnx

[gospodin.horoshiy]

I checked and you can't save agentd.conf in unicode format, because agentd service won't start this way...

[NeXTstep]

Confirmed

Hello,

I confirm the problem in French language :
Perfcounters like this work :
PerfCounter=CPU_Total_user,"\Processeur(_Total)\% Temps Utilisateur",3

since there's no accentuated characters inside. Besides, this one doesn't work :
PerfCounter=CPU_Total_idle,"\Processeur(_Total)\% durée d'inactivité",3

Conf file UTF-8 reencoding ends up with this message :
zabbix_agentd.exe [300]: Error in line [1] "´╗┐# This is a config file for Zabbix Agent (Unix)"

I guess I'll give a try to the "data item" way, but still would you have a clue about accentuated perfcounters in the conf file not working anymore ?

[NeXTstep]

Clues

Ok I checked something :

The reason I had to use perfcounter in the conf file in the first place was because since 1.4 you couldn't get the ones in template Windows to work properly on French Windows : Agent logs :
Can't add counter [\System\File Write Bytes/sec] [L'objet spécifié n'a pas été trouvé sur le système.]

By now, I checked in the new frontend (it's far easier to read, thanks for the work), those english perfcounters are still marked in error ; Anyway I tried creating a new item (Zabbix agent type) with key :
perf_counter[\Processeur(_Total)\% durée d'inactivité]

... And it works just fine . Thanks for the clue Rincewind (perfcounters with non-latin characters works fine) !

I don't know if you can use these for your problem, gospodin.horoshiy, but maybe with huge templating job you could use it anyway ? Or even trickyer : couldn't you use variable from a zabbix item to get the nic name, and use it thereafter in a perfcounter template ?

[bobrivers]

I agree with Gospodin

Just to support what Gospodin said: I also prefer to use the performance counters in the conf file, because, by doing this ways, I can "standardize" my item name.

Since I never managed to use numbers (as in zabbix manual) and the network card names are different across servers, it's better to do it in conf file, avoiding having to clone lots of items just to change it's name.

In my opinion, this lack of functionality, this is a huge flaw in zabbix.

[gospodin.horoshiy]

https://support.zabbix.com/browse/ZBX-1572

Should be fixed in the latest build, I suppose